What I Read When I'm Away from You

I want to tell you about some of the books I've read. The list is kind of long, so I'm going to describe two at a time.

Reading helps pass the time, and I feel like I learn a lot, too. Some of these books I'll probably read to you when I get home. 

So starting at the beginning... 

War

I had read this at home, but I read it again when I arrived in Afghanistan. It is one man's experience in a really tough place here during some pretty crazy fighting. The person who wrote it is not a Soldier, so his perspective is different from other war memoirs. I love how concise and descriptive he is about the day to day existence in a place where it was probably really hard to live-- and fight. Some of the Soldiers he met died, but they all fought really hard, and it helped me understand what motivated them. 

Man's Search for Meaning

Victor Frankl was a prisoner during a war 75 years ago, long before I was born. And he was a prisoner even though he didn't do anything wrong. It was during another big war, and the bad guys gathered all of the Jews they could find and put them in camps that were really dirty and hard. The Jews thought they were going to die, and in fact, the bad guys did kill a lot of them. Mr. Frankl was a psychologist, meaning that he studied how people's minds worked. So as a prisoner, he wanted to know how he could possibly find any meaning or happiness in his life if he thought he might die any day. It is a great book to help you realize that life always has challenges, but your mind has an unlimited ability to make the best of any situation. 

Ready Player One

Fiction is the kind of writing that isn't about something that really happened. It's a story that someone made up, and this book was a really fun one. It takes place in the future, when people were so sad that they spent most of their time on the computer. But in the story, people put on goggles to make them feel like they were in a different place. It's called "virtual reality," and in this story it felt so real that some people didn't want to leave it. A boy ends up going on an adventure and meeting new friends in the virtual reality, but then he decides that real reality might be better.